Too Much Happiness

The three-time winner of the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary honor, as well as the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro published this collection of superb short fiction in 2009.In the first of nine stories, a young mother receives relief—from a most surprising source—for the pain of losing her three children. In another, a young woman in the aftermath of a strange and humiliating seduction reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the deep-holes in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provokes both the good things in his life and the bad. The long title story follows Sophia Kovalevsky—a Russian émigré and mathematician in the late 19th century—on a winter journey from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.